Pavan K Varma | Are the criteria to award Nobel wholly objective?

The prestigious Nobel Prize winners for 2022 have been announced. Our felicitations go to the awardees. However, it is noticeable that in this year’s list, there is not a single name from Asia, Africa and South America. Is this a coincidence or the dominant trend happily accepted by the rest of the excluded world? Since Indians, give so much importance to this prize, it is useful to examine if the criteria for this prize are entirely objective. 

Since the inception of the Nobel Prize in 1895, it appears to be consistently Eurocentric. Over 75 per cent of winners in the last 20 years have been from Europe. The United Kingdom has won 137 prizes; Germany 111; France 73; Russia 32; Sweden 33; Canada 28; Switzerland 27; and Netherlands 22. The United States has won the maximum, 406. The one exception in Asia is Japan, which has won 29 prizes. Is it coincidental that it is a staunch ally of the West? It is striking, though, that Sweden itself, with a population of only 9.5 million, has won the same number of prizes as all of Asia and Africa, with a combined population of 5.5 billion. 

It is essential, therefore, that instead of getting mesmerised by the aura of the Nobel Prize — and without necessarily discounting it — we interrogate some of its decisions. After all, how important or objective or desirable can the Nobel Prize for Peace be if Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest messiah of non-violence the world has seen for centuries, never got it. His name was nominated several times but Sweden did not want to annoy Britain. After 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru was nominated 11 times, but he too did not get it. However, Henry Kissinger, adviser to American President Richard Nixon, won it. His contributions to peace included using napalm bombs in Vietnam, and supporting Pakistani dictator General Yahya Khan in the Bangladeshi Liberation War. Kissinger actually sneered at people who “bleed” for the “dying Bengalis”. 

This year, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to two organisations and one individual. Ales Bialiatski, is a prominent human rights activist in Belarus; Memorial is a human rights organisation in Russia; and the Centre for Civil Liberties is a human rights organisation in Ukraine. It is entirely possible that these awardees need to be given the Prize for their commendable work. But it is absolutely certain that all of them are working in areas which are completely congruent with the West’s agenda in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Besides, the attempt to use the Prize to legitimise the West’s interest, appears to suffer from an expedient selectivity. If the US and the West unilaterally and unwarrantedly break all international law and invade Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, killing millions, those protesting these wanton brutalities are never considered for the award. 

There are other curiosities. No Indian after Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 has got the Nobel for Literature. In a country, which has arguably the richest linguistic heritage in the world, is there not a single writer since 1913 worthy of this award? Munshi Premchand, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Mahasweta Devi, Gulzar?  V.S Naipaul — Indian by descent and British by choice — did win the Prize in 2001, but only after he had endeared himself to the West after 9/11 by his strident criticism of the Islamic world.

There are also blatant double standards. Dissident Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 when he was being feted by the West for his opposition to the former Soviet Union. But later, when he began to be critical of certain aspects of Western civilisation, his utility diminished. In a speech at Harvard in 1978 he accused the West of being blinded by its own sense of superiority. “But the blindness of superiority continues”, he said in that speech, “and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of the present-day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive… Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real, picture of our planet’s development is quite different.” These were strong words and predictably, he began to fade away from the celebrity radar screens.  When he died in 2008 there was hardly a ripple. 

I sometimes wonder if the “incomprehension” that Solzhenitsyn talks about is based on condescension, or worse, gratuitous ignorance. When I was director general of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, I hosted a dinner for Sir Martine Davidson, the CEO of the British Council, who was visiting Delhi. Several well-known artists, writers, educationists and musicians were invited. Among them was the legendary sarod player, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan. Davidson met Amjad Bhai warmly, and then with well-meaning curiosity asked: “So what do you play?” There was stunned silence, and I hastened to direct the guest elsewhere. Davidson did not, I’m convinced, mean to be insulting. But the fact that the head of Britain’s premier cultural body — whose motto is “Learn, Share, Connect Worldwide” — did not know who Ustad Amjad Ali Khan was, and did not think of educating himself by at the least going through the list of invitees and their bios which had been sent in advance to the local British Council office, was appalling.

Civilisations, like India, which have evolved since the dawn of time, and have a rich tradition of cerebral application of mind, should learn to be judiciously interrogative of biases which masquerade as global objectivity. This is not to decry or devalue the Nobel Prize, but to argue that we should, through our own prism, be able to evaluate its impartiality. And, there should be no mimicry. Mother Teresa got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.  Only next year did we give her the Bharat Ratna. Why could it not have been the other way around?